by Rob Lowe
Then came the love scene.
The sequence seemed to surprise her, which made little sense since the scene wasn’t new or a rewrite; it had always been in the script, which I could only hope and assume she had actually read previously.
But for whatever reason, on the day of the shoot, things were different. For the first time, she brought her boyfriend to the set. It was great for me; I’m a huge sports fan and he was an iconic rodeo champion and a really nice guy. I got him a seat at the monitor next to her chair, but she elected to sit on his lap.
By the way, when I say “love scene,” I’m not talking about her and I being totally naked like Demi Moore and me in About Last Night . . . , or Kim Cattrall in Masquerade, or Jodie Foster or Nastassja Kinski in Hotel New Hampshire. Those were movies; this was television, and not even cable! How steamy can you be with no nudity and a network censor editing your story lines? In fact, the “love scene” was really just a moment where, fully clothed, in a deserted office late at night, we kissed, then lay down on a desk. And even that part was out of frame.
Jewel didn’t want to kiss me. She asked if we could restage the scene without it. We tried it, because you never know what good might come out of another actor’s instinct, however bad it may seem. Not surprisingly, it turned out that we needed to kiss to make the scene a “love” scene. Jewel balked and ran to the monitor, where she jumped onto her boyfriend’s lap. She began kissing him instead.
I was beginning to take it personally. I checked my breath; it seemed okay to me, but I popped an Altoid just to be safe. The director huddled with both Jewel and her man, trying to get us back on track.
I gave them their space as the crew watched this little drama play out. My mind took the opportunity to work through the laundry list of challenges of the day. There were story pitches to go over, edited footage to look at, an international press junket during lunch and a meeting with our director of photography about tweaking the show’s visuals. I checked my watch, worrying about staying on schedule. Someone opened a door somewhere and I smelled the eye-watering, headache-inducing aroma of what I assumed to be the color magenta.
Finally, Jewel and the director made their way back to the set. She didn’t seem pleased.
“Let’s just do this,” she said.
We did the scene and it went well. But as we approached the kissing moment it became strained, and it’s never good when you can’t trust that your fellow actor is on the same page. I had no idea what this woman would do when I had to kiss her.
The moment arrived.
The script called for a heated, passionate coming together. But it ended up being less Fifty Shades of Grey and more Grey Gardens. And by that I mean confusing, a little scary and very slow. I pecked her on the lips; her mouth scrunched closed like you would do if someone was going to stick something unwanted into it, which I was not intending.
I sort of moved my head from side to side to make it look real, like there was at least a dollop of energy or passion.
“Cut,” said the director.
Jewel looked at me and wiped the back of her hand across her lips like an American Sign Language version of “Yuck.”
But at that point it was just another in a long series of breaks that just weren’t going my way. The scene, and her whole story line, ended up being a nonevent. And although we had planned to have one of Jewel’s beautiful ballads under our love scene, in the end, I used one from Dido instead.
* * *
I am an eternal, never-say-die optimist. I will fight to the last man. But I also would never have gotten from the bad neighborhoods of Dayton, Ohio, to where I am now without being able to delude myself when needed. As our ratings failed to improve and signals of our demise were everywhere, I woke up every day convinced that we could turn it around.
My old pal from the eighties, Michael J. Fox, had not done television in over a decade. But one of our best writers, Kevin Falls, whom I imported from The West Wing, had pitched a character that was extraordinary. We hoped it might lure Mike to do our show. Now that would be a game changer. To my delight, Mike didn’t dismiss it out of hand. He had only one request. He wanted to read it by the following week, as he was going out of town and needed to reschedule if he liked the part.
“That’s plenty of time. We will write you something great,” I said.
A week later there were still no scenes to show Mike. Kevin Falls and I were pulling our hair out, but our head writer was behind closed doors.
“Why don’t you just write the scenes?” I asked Kevin.
“Can’t, that’s the head writer’s area.”
On the last day to get the script to Mike, I went to the production office.
“I need the scene.”
“Sorry, he’s behind closed doors,” said the writer’s assistant.
“He’s been working on this for days!”
“I’m sorry, he can’t be disturbed.”
I grabbed the door and burst into the office.
The head writer didn’t look up from his computer screen; he was wearing headphones. I was stunned to see that instead of dialogue on his screen, there were video images of his kids playing basketball. I realized he was editing home movies.
Michael J. Fox never got his scenes and didn’t do our show. But Kevin Falls got promoted to take over all writing duties and overnight, I had hope again. Our stories became crisper; the show’s dramatic narrative was refined (we finally got rid of the endless “who killed the mentor” plot) and we made at least one or two episodes that were as good as anything I’d been a part of.
By Halloween, I was so exhausted from the fifteen-hour days, five days a week, plus the long commute from Santa Barbara, that I had a mattress installed in the back of the Suburban that brought me to work. I would crawl in in the morning darkness, still in my pajamas; arrive at sunrise; be plied with three shots of espresso and shower before makeup in my trailer. On the way home I watched the week’s footage on a DVD player and caught up on paperwork. I had no time for anything else; I barely saw my family, I left before dawn and I got home as the kids went to sleep. I was a shell.
One day, our route to work was cut off by a giant, raging wildfire that was causing the evacuation of the entire northwestern Valley. All around the hillside of the 118 freeway I could see fifty-foot flames shooting into the graying dawn. It was already hot as hell. It was five thirty in the morning and eighty degrees.
Pulling up to our industrial complex, there was chaos at the dildo factory. An unsettling-looking group scurried to prepare for what I was now told was “imminent evacuations.” But at The Lyon’s Den, we knew we had no such option. We would shoot regardless. The guys who make dildos may get to run for safety, but those who make television do not.
Due to the extreme heat, our air conditioners, which were rudimentary anyway, failed by noon. The temperature on the set stood at 103 degrees. The paint fumes in that kind of heat were making some on the crew faint. The noise of firefighting helicopters and fire engines made shooting almost impossible.
Around three o’clock, I received an urgent summons to the production offices. I put the cast and crew on a ten-minute break and weaved my way through the prefab hallways and other elements of the set to the main offices. Stepping outside, I saw that the fire was roaring down from the hills a few miles away. “Perfect metaphor for this show,” I remember thinking.
The president of NBC was holding and wanted Kevin Falls and me on the line ASAP. Settling in to pick up the call, we hoped he was calling to congratulate us on a particular story line he had personally requested, which we had added into an episode in record time. But looking out the office’s windows at a stream of emergency crews rushing to the advancing inferno, even the eternal optimist knew the writing was on the wall.
“Sorry, guys, we’re pulling the show,” he said immediately, the moment we picked up. And that was that. After airing six episodes, The Lyon’s Den was done. Although not officially canceled. No one in televisio
n uses that phrase anymore. Shows aren’t canceled these days, they are “off the schedule” or “on hiatus” or “pulled.” It’s absurd because everyone knows when a show is dead no matter what new, feel-good, never-admit-a-failure buzz-speak you use. It’s like asking your vet, “Did my cat survive his operation?” and being told, “Well, his vital signs are currently on hiatus.”
Regardless, the studio that financed The Lyon’s Den for NBC wanted us to shoot our contractually obligated thirteen-episode order, even though they would never be aired. The theory was that money might still be made on DVDs or in foreign markets. This is a pretty rare occurrence and a real character builder. It is not easy to get it up for fourteen-hour days working on a canceled TV show.
All my life, and still today, I’ve pushed through negativity, setbacks, bad reviews, poor ratings and breaks going against me whenever I’ve had to. As the ominous signs piled up on The Lyon’s Den I herniated myself trying to find a silver lining. I worked to the final moment and hoped against hope that there might be a turnaround. I kept waiting for the trend to reverse. And I also never lost sight of the fact that through hard work and God’s grace, I live a very blessed life. A failed TV show is the very definition of a first-world problem.
The cast and crew took the news as well as could be expected. We had become close, as one does when you are under fire. I shared with them a new lesson I had learned from my experiences on everything from successes like Wayne’s World and The West Wing to projects that didn’t work out: “Sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop something from being a hit and sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop something from being a flop.” The show-business gods cannot be manipulated. It is both the good news and bad news of our line of work.
But there was worse to come.
Shortly after our cancelation, my mother passed away at sixty-four, from her battle with breast cancer. It happened on a weekend; my wife, my brother Micah and I were with her till the end. I went to work Monday; my producing partners and the studio asked if I wanted time off, but the show would’ve shut down without me. I wrote my mother’s eulogy on the set between scenes. I would like to think she would’ve been proud of that.
All things end. They rarely end as we would like them to and often do so before we are ready. We transition in a way that gives our loss honor; we grieve with a love and true appreciation for what we have no longer. It was clear that my mom was ready to go; it was her time. My love of her and my desperation to keep her in my life were of no consequence to that fact, any more than my relentless attempts to improve The Lyon’s Den kept it from cancellation. Both personally and professionally I was swamped with the message: Your plan pales compared to the larger one.
We laid my mother to rest under a shading oak on a sweltering afternoon in Santa Barbara. The turnout for her was huge and I was overcome by the support of so many friends. When my sons spoke to the packed church at eight and ten years old, dressed in their tiny suits, it was one of the proudest moments of my life.
Back on the set, we still had a number of episodes to shoot and scripts to write. Since The Lyon’s Den was a “dead” show, no one from the network or studio was mandating our story lines. We had complete freedom. “What should we do with the remaining episodes? How should we end the series?” Kevin Falls asked me.
“Let’s go out strong. Let’s be daring. Let’s burn all the bridges,” I said.
So in the end, we built to a finale that no one would see coming. We decided to blow people’s minds. (Not that anyone would see it, unless they lived in some foreign hinterland where they air failed shows.) We decided that my character, the hero of The Lyon’s Den, would be revealed as a psychopathic schizophrenic who was, in fact, the murderer of his mentor. To their credit, when we shared this outrageous finale with the studio, they said, “Hey, whatever you guys want!”
So on the last day, we shot the last scene of the script. It took place in the law office’s big conference room late at night. I sat eating a steak as I invited my office rival, the future coach of Friday Night Lights, Kyle Chandler, to a final showdown. In it, he confronted me about secretly being on antipsychotic meds and my involvement in my mentor’s death. I walked toward him with a smile, blithely confessed to murder, then stabbed him to death with my steak knife. I then finished my meal, walked to the office balcony and committed suicide by throwing myself off. End of series.
For some reason, I’ve never seen these final episodes. Every once in a while I’ll get a fan letter from Slovakia or Azerbaijan from someone who has. “I saw the ending of The Lyon’s Den! Jesus Christ! It was insane! You must be crazy!” I usually write back, “No, the TV business is crazy, I’m just learning as I go.”
The cast of the Lyon’s Den (from left, Frances Fisher, James Pickens Jr., Matt Craven, me, Kyle Chandler, Elizabeth Mitchell, David Krumholtz).
With my character’s would-be love interest, Jewel.
The Mansion
Being eighteen and a freshly minted movie star, only a few years away from Dayton, Ohio, was a mixed bag. On one hand my life’s goal was coming into focus, but I was having to navigate some fast-moving waters in Hollywood. And, like any male eighteen-year-old, the most pressing developmental issue I had to face was sex and romance, and how they fit into my life.
I had my first crush in the first grade but got talked out of it by my friends who thought the girl was not up to their seven-year-old standards. By the time I was fifteen I had struggled through the challenge of my peers thinking I was a “theater fag” because I wanted to be an actor and finally found my first serious girlfriend. As my career began to really take off, that relationship began to end, a casualty of immaturity, jealousy and the first blush of fame. By the time my other friends were out of the house for the first time, I was on locations making movies or pounding the pavement in Hollywood, building my career in earnest. And like all young men, it was during those years that I explored all I could about love, relationships, sex and the connections between the three. Of all the “personal discovery” journeys I’ve been on, this one was clearly the most fun.
Helping matters greatly was the time line: It was pre-AIDS and before the lessons of recreational drug use taught us that cocaine was not an appropriate status symbol. It was also in the time before everyone had a cell phone with a camera attached, before the Internet and Facebook and a culture where everyone simply has to post every photo of every party they attend. Although there was the National Enquirer and Star (then a true tabloid and not a celeb-photo book), there was no TMZ or Radar, no Perez Hilton or any of today’s myriad of pay-for-play gossip sites. There were no armies of paparazzi staked out in my beloved Malibu or on Rodeo Drive or at LAX or any of the cool restaurants or clubs. There were no “Stars Are Just Like Us!”/“Baby Bump Watch!” banal and reductive celeb editorializations in the “straight” media. It wouldn’t have been tolerated, either by the public or on the streets at the clubs or restaurants. But then again, the cover boys of that era were Beatty, Newman and Redford. Instead of couples from Dancing with the Stars, we had Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. It was a totally different era in terms of what we valued. The net effect was this: We were more innocent and trusting, and there was actually some privacy and decorum, but with plenty of room to get wild, if the opportunity arose.
It was also before the two events that irreparably damaged one of the great bastions of the sexual revolution, the Playboy Mansion. Internet porn killed the business model and reality TV killed the Bunnies. With the possible exception of becoming a Laker Girl (today also devoid of its status), back then, if you were a gorgeous, marginally talented young woman, becoming a Bunny was one of your only shots at fame. Not anymore. Today, if you are willing to eat bugs or throw a chair at your best friend or mother, you can star in a reality TV series.
The Playboy Mansion of the early to mideighties was a thing to behold. Sure, even as a nineteen-year-old, I knew it was on a slide from its heyday. But to ha
ve been there in the seventies when Hef was young, the pill was new and James Caan lived there would have been too much to handle. I barely survived my first-time visit as it was!
An invitation to come to the mansion for movie night was a tough ticket to get. You couldn’t buy your way in; you couldn’t use connections or a publicist or any Hollywood lever pulling. Invitations came directly from Hugh Hefner, and he cast his parties very carefully in those days. In his magazine, the Playboy interview was the most insightful, dangerous, prestigious and coveted profile in all media, so there was a patina of intellectual exclusiveness almost as strong as the sexual undercurrent associated with Hef’s gatherings. The crowd could vary from screenwriting geniuses like Robert Towne and Buck Henry to star athletes like Magic Johnson. It goes without saying that you would also see the absolute top tier of beautiful and usually available women that LA had to offer. That they were comprised of the top lookers of a wide range of American cities effectively made them among the most stunning groups of women in the country.
I had just finished The Outsiders when I got a call from “Mr. Hefner’s” office inviting me to a Super Bowl party. I was specifically told that I could not bring a guest and I was required (for reasons I never understood) to provide my driver’s license number and a description of the car I would be driving.
I was the envy of all my pals. My friends from my school days in Malibu always enjoyed the collateral of my new life in the movies, but the Playboy Mansion! Are you kidding me?! We had visions of God only knows what streaming through our heads. Of course they were bummed that they couldn’t come with me.
“I will go it alone,” I said solemnly.
On game day I arrived at the mansion’s massive gates on Charing Cross Road in Holmby Hills, an even more exclusive area than Beverly Hills, if you can imagine. Sitting in my first car, a white Mazda 626, I waited to be let in. After a moment, I heard a voice.